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It is often said of sausages, that if people knew how they were made, most wouldn’t eat them. In the carefree period of my days as an avenging vegetarian vigilante; I put to good use a variation of this argument to implore my meat eating friends to change. My unfettered zeal was not beyond resorting to liberal mention (in inappropriate settings) of the methods of slaughter in abattoirs; an exercise that would shock folk, one way or another, into distaste. It was a different matter that I hadn’t been to any either; the intention was to frighten with a horrific picture of violence that would then interrupt acculturated eating patterns. With the mellow tempering that comes with years, I have long realized the futility and the possible crudity of my ways. Yet, I am unapologetically glad to say they did bear some fruition and that I was able to convert a couple along the way.

Because of the inherent violence in slaying animals that don’t have a choice in either resisting the assault or protesting it; vegetarianism is commonly linked to and laced with ethics. Talk of animal slaughter (for any reason, let alone the exquisitely base reason of cuisine), provokes mental images of violence, bloodletting and gore. Despite the effort of some quarters, who have undertaken to make the exercise more ‘humane’; the imagery of slaughter has altered little. The rising global movement towards vegetarianism owes (in so small part), a debt to its origins in the discomfort with the ethics of violence. In the context of civilization as an exercise to domesticate our base instincts; this is a welcome turn on the road to betterment.

The ethics of food has been finely articulated in the world of letters by many; but, three people, to my mind, have especially influenced the discussion. Peter Singer who brought animal rights to the table in the seventies with a seminal work on the subject titled, Animal Liberation; David Foster Wallace with a cult essay, ‘Consider the Lobster’ and Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee in innumerable writings and interviews but notably so in, ‘Disgrace’. In recent years two other books have been received with much favor – Jonathan Safranfoer’s eponymously titled, ‘Eating animals’, and Temple Grandin’s “Animals in translation’, on animal behavior and on humane restraining and transport systems.

I don’t often read a book or watch a film that has animals in it. Most such ventures put their audience through the predictable loop of great sadness to get to the happy place – an immensely avoidable experience in wrenching anxiety. Yet, some years back I watched a lovely animation film, ‘Madagascar’ that told the tale of four friends – a lion, a zebra, a hippo and a giraffe, born New Yorkers and raised in the confines of the Central Park Zoo. Alex, the lion, (and the chief entertainment for all the zoo visitors) wakes up on his birthday to a primal longing for ‘home’. In a misadventure, that all but he are wise to, the loyal friends set out to Africa to discover their roots. All is well until Alex gets hungry and can’t find anything to eat. The Manhattan-ite with the splendid mane was reared on aesthetically shaped platters of ‘food’ and had never known the experience of the hunt.

The desperation of hunger in the jungles of Africa stirs his inner hunter and suddenly Marty’s stripes (the zebra) start seeming like the delicate axial cuts of meat that was once his urbane diet. But ‘that’ was an unknown innocuous thing the keeper called, ‘food’, and ‘this’ was Marty! In shame, despair, and with a destroyed sense of self, Alex runs away to hide from his best friend. After some twists and turns, a happy resolution is found and the story ends well. Madagascar is a masterful depiction of the moral conflict of a carnivore. Using the argument of innocence rather than judgment, it incited debate over meat-eating and steered reason away from morality and towards process. It explored by example how; to meat eaters, meat was simply food sanitized off violence and stocked as just another packaged product on the shelf. When confronted with the violence of meat, most people are jolted out of their safe zones; enough even at times, to retract from and disown their eating habits.

Tastefully served platters, sanitized packaging, and the lack of mainstream debate on farming and slaughter, spare omnivores from having to confront the ethics and allows them to fall back on the comfort of familiar habit.

Pic courtesy: @ChirurgeonsAppr

The spectrum of meat-eating as food culture spawns a range of experience with gore. From meat eaters outside the confines of home, to packaged-meat buyers in supermarkets who cook at home, to buyers who buy at butchers and deal with sanitation issues in the process of cooking, to the butchers, to the slaughter house workers and finally, to the farmer who breeds, rears and trades in animal life. One’s positional coordinates in the spectrum determines the degree of gore that one is subjected to. Whilst, from this, no causal inferences can be made to violent behavior; it might not be far off the mark to regard a correlative connect between omnivores and forbearance with violence. Than say, vegetarians. Acclimatization to the taking of life, to the loss of life in violence might be directly related to the degree of involvement with the process of slaughter.

It is generally accepted knowledge that vegetarians are prone to non-violence and have a low capacity with and for active aggression. The scientific evidence of that might lie more with their ideological beliefs and from the lack of exposure than to any specific aspect of diet. India’s diverse cultural heritage is unsurprisingly home to ethnic groups (a readily available cohort) who practice a staunch and rigorous vegetarianism as a cornerstone of identity. Prominent amongst them are the Jains, Marwaris, Brahmins, Namboodhiris, Lingayats and Saiva Pillais. Vegetarianism with these groups stems from ahimsa (non-violence) and a quasi-animist belief in the respect for life in any and every form; not just the human. In modern times, not all people born into these ethnicities follow the prescribed lifestyle. But for those that do and for the millions of vegetarian converts around the world, the abhorrence of violence is a common bond.

Eating habits of any sort are hard to break out of. Given that knowledge, should children be allowed to make their own choice with meat eating at an older age? I have seen parents deny children ‘adult’ beverages (read coffee and tea) to young tots. The same people don’t think twice about taking kids to a MacDonald’s or a KFC for a meal. Do the children know that every packaged burger or KFC meal has a ‘Marty’ within? Wouldn’t they want to know?

Aside from philosophy, is diet interlinked with behavior? Research into the impact of diet on mental conditioning and aggression unravels a role for both Omega-3 fatty acids and for the ratio of Omega-6 and Omega-3 Fatty acids. Both Omega-3 and Omega-6 are essential fatty acids (EFA). [They are also called PUFAs – polyunsaturated fatty acids]. EFAs are fatty acids that we must (why they are called, ‘essential’) incorporate into our diet since our bodies don’t make them in sufficient enough quantity.

The research on fats is on-going and the debate goes back and forth on the importance or otherwise of different fatty acids to health and illness. There is accord, however, on the importance of EFAs (especially Omega-3) to the maintenance of cardiac, circulatory and neural equilibrium. Omega-3 (specifically, a type of Omega-3 called DHA) is concentrated in brain cells. Low levels of this fatty acid, in the body, are detrimental to the vitality of cell membranes. Imagine a cell as a circular or a rectangular structure; the cell membrane is its external limiting boundary. The vitality of the cell is obviously dependent on the integrity of the cell membrane. Omega-3 fatty acids (DHA especially) are an important component of cell membranes. Weak cell membranes cause cellular malfunctioning. This ultimately leads to the dysfunction of organs. In the brain, dysfunction manifests as behavioral change, mood disorders, aggression and violence.

Note: [red arrows: ALA is convertible (but inefficiently) to DHA and EPA in the body]; [dark blues: DHA is the EFA of brain cell membranes. AA competes with DHA for the cell membranes but is toxic to the cell. This is why the ratio of the Omega-6 to Omega-3 is important; the ideal ratio should be 1:1. Modern lifestyle foods that are heavily processed have high Omega –6 counts and skew the balance. The natural food that closely approximates the 1:1 ratio is ghee (1.6:1).

Recent research has affirmed the influence of supplementation of prisoners’ diets (with multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids) on violence reduction. More than one-third of study subjects (in two large RCTs with good sample sizes) recorded a marked decrease in violent and aggressive behavior. Based on these findings, the American Psychiatry Association has recommended the addition of 1 gm. of EPA+DHA to the daily dietary intake of individuals with mood, impulse control and psychotic disorders. A more rigorously designed trial, on these same lines but with the addition of blood chemistry and detailed psychometrics is currently under way on more than 1000 prisoners in three UK prisons to confirm definitively the nutritional link to violence.

Biology is an endeavor in optimism. It is the self-flagellating science that constantly looks at and into itself for the whys when human health and function go awry. Finding a biological basis for behavior gives us hope for a fix; holds out promise that we can control and modulate it. This is especially true for conditions with great social import such as violence and aggression. The accessibility of nutritional biology lays it bare to the dual threat of pseudo-science and commerce. Their rush to publish causal inferences makes the process of denying or reaffirming media conclusions harder on the science. Despite these pitfalls, current scientific opinion reiterates the positive psychotropic effect of Omega- 3 fatty acids. And so, for now, correcting our diets (both the vegetarian and the omnivorous) with the additional supplementation of Omega-3 fatty acids is a sensible starting point. As also might Madagascar. As they wise say; ‘the colors might change but the stripes they be the same’ and once an evangelist, always an evangelist.

I loved the last paragraph- because while food does play a role in behavior its not a dose response or causal relationship.

Also, I would respectfully disagree that

It is generally accepted knowledge that vegetarians are prone to non-violence and have a low capacity with and for active aggression.

Accepted by who and based on what evidence?

The Dalai Lama is a non-vegetarian. And unless vegetarianism is a concious choice based on beliefs about violence, which it isnt for most people- who “inherit” the vegetarianism, I don’t see how this translates into action.

It must also be noted that just because one beleives animals should not be treated with cruelty does NOT make them less violent in other aspects of their life- This, is a well accepted quirk of our brains, which can compartmentalize extremely well.

May I, in closing point out that the best source of Omega3FA is Fish? And the usefulness vs evil of Ghee is not fully settled,

I agree with what Anand Philip’s comments. And just to add my two cents:

1. I am not convinced that meat-eating is bad per se. Undoubtedly, the American steroid-laden version of meat is something that might qualify as a weapon of mass destruction, but did meat not help in our evolution? Eg:

2. The philosophical position advanced by Singer that animals are sentient and hence deserve an almost equal footing with humans is unconvincing to me because animals lack higher capacities of the brain to create narratives, be it art, philosophy, or history. Using the Madagascar example itself, it seems unnatural to me to condition a predator not to consume its natural food. I fear that we may be anthropomorphising cruelty, viciousness, and violence here.

3. To add to AP’s point about violence and meat-eating, it is rumoured that Hitler was a vegetarian and fond of cats 🙂 Now I am not stupid to use a singularity as evidence against an entire thesis, but I will add that to AP’s larger point that humans can compartmentalise violence quite well.

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

Thanks much Anand, for reading and for your comment. I’ll try to address your concerns here (am having a lot of trouble with this reply page) and will read your links later.

1. ‘generally accepted’ – Everything empirically known has not yet been put through the rigor of scientific analysis. I acknowledged this by adding the comment in the same paragraph on the readily available cohorts that can be easily studied.

2. That ‘vegetarianism is not a conscious choice but is faith based’ is equally empirical and I’ll grant that might be well be a cultural truism in our parts. Elsewhere though it is not. Even in vegetarian ethnicities; I pointed to the fact that many faith-born vegetarians have deviated from the identity prescription. In those that stay steadfast, a commitment to animal rights is often an equal reason.

3.

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

Sorry…continuing…
3. Indeed causal inferences are the bane of epidemiologic data with a countless variables. Have stressed that throughout.
4. You missed the last sentence. I said fish is ‘the’ source of Omega-3 🙂
As for ghee, indeed the science is conflicting. As regards the ratio; ghee approximates paleo-diets. On the other hand, ghee has a very low content of Omega-3. So, while cooking with ghee might well signify the route for returning prodigals; supplementation with Omega-3 with other named sources will still be necessary.
Again, Anand, thanks much. Really appreciate your comment and hope I was able to convince you. Cheers! 🙂

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

Thanks much for your comment, Ibn. I’ll try to address them in the same order as you’ve them down.

1. I am not making a judgmental call on meat eating. I am a vegetarian by principle and by choice and am an ardent supporter of animal rights. I therefore would dearly love to spare animals the fate of death to please human palates. Having said that; I must firmly say that I do NOT judge omnivores. Eating is automatism of a kind. We know transfats are terrible; yet, we reach for the bag of kettle cooked chips which screams transfats albeit in an attractive font. Sugar, soda..the lis is endless. Most omnivores are screened off from the violence. The packaging of meat has compartmentalized the violence from the food very well.

2. Alex eats meat in the CP Zoo. He only eats it in so sophisticated a style that he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t associate the sight and sound of the violence of a kill with what is on his plate. By doing that to Alex in the CP Zoo; indeed he was urbanised, domesticated, ‘civilized’ and therefore yes, anthropomorphized. While your point on anthropomorphizing Alex is well taken; the issue is not what are we doing to animals. But what are we doing to man? Slaughter of man (rare) and of animals (rampant) takes us closer to the kill in the wild and the hunter-gatherer days. In a sense it is the antithesis of everything we did in the name of ‘civilization’, which after all was an exercise in cordoning ourselves off from nature, since.

As for your point on our higher cognitive states; do we have a hierarchy of empathy with our fellow creatures. Is other words is a cow more deserving of our empathy than say a sheep? I am sure some might agree; but..

p

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/DTD2IPARHXKR4TRWSTKOBEHSPE ravi

You got the Madagascar story wrong. Its Marty’s birthday and he longs to go back home. Alex loved NY.

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

Am making a terrible botch of replying here; the page flies away from me/ will leave it here by saying thanks again for your comments and for the exchange. Cheers!

http://www.facebook.com/betoquintas Roberto Quintas

“if people knew how they were made, most wouldn’t eat them”. that works also to vegetables…

1. The first point was not about ethics but the important role meat-eating played in evolution. And while anyone would agree with you about the dismal state of slaughter houses, it does not mean that we cannot have a food industry that produces non-steroid, open range meat (like that Ted fellow with his massive bison ranch in Montana).

2. I take it that you see violence as antithetical to civilisation? I am not so sure if that is not an unduly heavy burden on man’s innate nature…or too constricting a view of civilisation. Hunting has long been a part of society – never went away. Now, it has been industrialised. Cannot feel guilty for being on top of the food chain! 🙂 Again, I think your real issue is the upkeep of slaughter houses, with which I am in agreement.

3. One has to draw a line somewhere – if “life” is your standard, then plants are alive too…and that would be reductio ad absurdum!

mark gillono

i’ll visit a vegatable harvest if you visit a slaughterhouse…

mark gillono

1-exploiting, oppressing and killing other sentient beings for one’s own personal gratification is ethically wrong and morally corrupt, no matter how well you deem the enslaved victims are treated. the minimum standard of decency is to follow the Golden Rule for all species and treat them the way you wish to be treated.

2-did you ever consider that socially accepted forms of violence such as hunting and killing non-human animals for food are directly related to the fact that humans are so war like and violent to each other?

3. thew line is drawn by the sentience of the living being and his or her ability to suffer. plants do not have a central nervous system and feel no pain.

mark gillono

“Unless we live with non-violence and reverence for all living beings in our hearts, all our humaneness and acts of goodness, all our vows, virtues, and knowledge, all our practices to give up greed and acquisitiveness are meaningless and useless.” “He who harms
animals has not understood or renounced deeds of sin… Those whose minds are at peace and who are free from passions do not desire to live at the expense of others.” – Mahavira

mark gillono

1. what does the past have to do with the present? it is very likey that humans procreated by rape at some point in our history so does that justify raping a women today?

3. Hitler was not a vegetarian-this is false false propaganda which was spread by the nazi party. even if he was, it would be the logical fallacy of confusing association with causation to try to use this as an argument for consuming animal flesh.

mark gillono

the best source of omega 3 is NOT fish-it is where the fish get the Omega3 from ie the seaweed and plankton which they consume.

the comedy of vegetarianism is reaching epic proportions.our ships,weapons,medical reasearch,electric lines,power generations kill living creatures of all sizes a thousand times more every day and we have here people gulping litres of milk (do they think that milk secretes on its own and doesnt depend on labour.one has to witness the milk collection to know how they pull the calf after a few seconds forcibly and the wails of both and the mother and the calf will be pleasant to the indian vegetarian preachers )preaching vegetarianism.
farming kills more creatures for its success than what one eats. A single oil spill killed more sea creatures than what has been consumed by humans in 100 years.linking of food and aggression is just sugar coating manu dharma or caste based stupidities and nothing else

So your wisdom says that slaughtering a cow is the same as taking its milk? Grow up!

http://twitter.com/ganpat73 munusamy ganapathy

if slaughtering is murder extracting milk is sexual assault.milk is secreted for the calf and not for others to fiddle with the mammary glands of the animal.the anger and outburst exhibited by milk gulping ?vegetarians is very comical

mohan kumar

All the studies suggesting meat eating as important for evolution are only suggestive and they are not absolute truths. Maybe meat eating was a an evolutionary need at some point of time but later on vegetarianism took lead in human cultural evolution. All civilizations since ancient times took to agriculture in a big way to develop. without agriculture being predominant component of food the society has never developed culturally. Leaving aside the ethical/religious question involved in Meat eating or evolutionary impact in prehistoric times, important thing now is Energy efficiency of Meat eating for human society. Meat production now is energy inefficient ( read about food chain and food cycle). Meat production is not environment friendly, its carbon imprint is many times higher than vegetarian food, and when Meat gets processed its carbon imprint gets bigger. The impact of meat eating on greenhouse effect is enormous so turning vegetarian makes more sense,if we are concerned about the future of this planet.There are several proven, replicable and empirically verifiable scientific experiments proving these effects.

http://twitter.com/Stupidosaur Stupidosaur

Veg-non veg debate is pretty vast topic and we could go on and on. And in spite of being a vegetarian right now, I think humans are meant to be omnivores. But before we jump to that, and since we engaged on Twitter, let me just put those thoughts out here regarding specific aspects of your post:

Your first para is just a personal anecdotal intro. Not delving much into that.

Next, you say “Because of the inherent violence in slaying animals that don’t have a choice in either resisting the assault or protesting it”. If you think on those lines, plants are even worse off! They can’t even shake violently and bleat or bray when you kill and cook them for food. And yet that is ethical? Doesn’t make any logical sense. Your paragraph goes on to talk about mental images of violence, bloodletting etc. So suppose we bring a rule that all animals reared for meat eating should first be killed or made unconscious in a non violent way by injecting them with some medication, would that become ethical? (Of course we will invent or choose a food grade chemical, which is safe for consumption via food as opposed to given intravenously)

Think about those two scenarios (plant having life too, and option of animals killed non violently for meat) and you might start seeing the basic flaw in your argument that killing animals for food is bad ethics, while killing plants is not (either both are, and nothing we can do about it, or both aren’t and are natural part of food cycle on Earth)

Next paragraphs, well I haven’t read those eminent people, and can’t read those vast volumes just to make a comment here 🙂 You expressed your thoughts in blog, I’ll move on and express mine. Of course some day in life, if I get a chance I might read them. I also hope to see Madagascar some day 🙂

Next you say Tastefully served platters, sanitized packaging, and the lack of mainstream debate on farming and slaughter, spare omnivores from having to confront the ethics and allows them to fall back on the comfort of familiar habit.” Same can be said of vegetarians. Have you ever thought how those plants are made to systematically grow in a life of captivity and forced discipline on farms instead of allowing them to sprout free and carefree wherever they like in the wild? Have you ever thought how much torture they face when cut off simply for their seeds or fruits towards end of that? And forget just the plants! Those fruits/seeds/veggies are actually the next generation! We eat up those babies even before they can start living their life as a plant! Vegetarians are baby killers then! There should be a mainstream debate about this and vegetarians should be jolted out of their comfort of familiar habit and made to debate this! 😉

Next paragraph is just full of only ‘opinion’ by your own admission, not hard facts. You said that too, but not in words as direct as me. For example, is there any hard evidence that the beg ‘ethnicities’ you mentioned are actually less ciolent? Are the ‘ethnicities’ you mention less violent due to food habits? Maybe there are other more cultural reasons. These were traditionally the trader class or spiritual class (vaishyas/brahmanas) and non-violence instills more business confidence in these vocations. And in fact you contradict yourself a little too 1) If veg people are non-violent scientifically due to non exposure to violence involved in eating animals, then non veg people should be fine too, because starting from first para you have said that most non veg people are not directly or constantly aware of the violent history of the food on their table. You had to remind them now and then. 2) But then you also said in another whole paragraph that they are exposed to one level of gore or another in the slaughter process. So you are kind of going round and round just to stick to your stance, but not stick to any objective reality one way or the other. Also, I agree with you there seems to be a trend of people turning to veg, though I don’t know how big that wave is globally. But I disagree it is mostly due to people getting grossed by or hurt by pretty animals getting killed. There are better scientific reasons (some of which I hope to touch upon later, if this itself doesn’t get too long and bore my of myself).

Sure, kids should be told truth that their food has animals. But then you should also make them sow some grains of wheat/moong etc and let them see the lush green beautiful sapling that emerges from it and tell them that because they eat rotis, they didn’t allow such a lovely life to come into existence. Also, I guess most kids should stop eating Bournville after seeing how cute cocoa beans in that ad were taken to make chocolate 😛 But then those kids were sort of ‘happy’ to die that way (that bad un-chosen cocoa bean was sad) So I guess we could similarly make cartoons of a Marty happy to be chosen to be made into a hamburger? Anyways, my point is this is all sentimentality and can be presented to kids in ‘failry tales’ of both kinds. So if you insist, give them fair hard facts. Food has animals that lived. Food has plants that lived and could have lived. Or maybe just leave it. Unfair to show meat as Marty (who shouldn’t have died) and Bournville being made of beans (who are happy to die for it)

That concludes my comment on ‘philosophy’ aspect of your blog. Main point being, plants and animals are part of food chain. Both are alive. Either it is ok to eat both or you better evolve and be capable of synthesizing your own food using sunlight and environmental molecules and stop eating both. If killing animals is violence, killing plants is violence too. Also, perhaps milking a cow for vegetarians is eve-teasing? Not to forget that calves are often underfed for sake of commercial milk production. Constant suffering of an animal for sake of vegetarians rather than just one-time kill for sake of non-vegetarians.

Best to leave ‘ethics’ ‘violence’ etc out of diet debate. There are more scientific points. And in parting mention, Hitler turned vegetarian just few years before starting WW2 and Mother Teresa used to eat chicken (at least that is what internet seems to suggest) Also, someone in comment above mentioned Dalai Lama eats non-veg 🙂

Let us see if I get time and energy to answer the remaining of your post which deals with more direct chemical/biological effect of veg/non-veg diet on behavior. Like I explained on Twitter, I disagree with much of that too.

srkris

>>I think humans are meant to be omnivores.<>If you think on those lines, plants are even worse off! They can’t even
shake violently and bleat or bray when you kill and cook them for food.<>So suppose we bring a rule that all animals reared for meat eating
should first be killed or made unconscious in a non violent way by injecting
them with some medication, would that become ethical?<>Hitler turned vegetarian<>Mother Teresa used to eat chicken<<

That old hag had her share of dirty deeds – read the book by Christopher
Hitchens "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and
Practice". So all her chickens clearly affected her brain.

1. I assume we can kill all the plants we want, right? So how does this arbitrary definition of sentience and ethics and morality exactly work?

2. Not at all…vegetarians should have been pacifists if that were the case.

3. A-ha. So we kill animals swiftly without pain and it’s okay. Good to know. For a second, I thought there was something more to this.

http://twitter.com/ganpat73 munusamy ganapathy

a single oil spill kills millions of living creatures and power generation by various modes kills billions but we focus just on diet as a sin.
its funny to see people with silk sarees (we can argue that worms doesnt have a vertebral column and can be killed)gulping litres of milk every day preaching about ills of meat consumption.

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

[ Your first para……delving much into that. ]

This was not meant to be a peer reviewed scientific paper. It is an opinion
piece that has held to the standards of scientific discourse and whose objective
was to get people talking on the subject. Judging by the response; it has
clearly achieved that goal. Thank you for reading it and for allowing the
argument to continue. The title was the choice of the editor; he or she has that
prerogative. As for facts: the nutritional aspect has extensive referencing.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is the examined life. It is an activity that
concerns thought and stretches the limits of understanding. Since both thought
and nutrition are related to biology, at some level; the title is not in
contradiction to the content. Also, I am unaware of any political bias on the
part of anybody involved and would strongly refute that claim.

[ Next, you say “Because of …… food grade chemical, which is safe for
consumption via food as opposed to given intravenously) ]

1. I fail to understand how it is logical to expect a conscious response
(from plants) when the capacity for consciousness does not exist and further use
that incapacity as a counterpoint?

2. It is unlikely that anyone imagines slaughter as, non-violent or as, not
causing suffering to the animal. You too concede the point by asking if painless
means of slaughter are ethical. Since the ethics of eating animals hinges on the
critical point of animal suffering – if no suffering was involved in killing,
the ethical question would then shift to the morality of taking a life. A murder
committed ‘humanely’ might be more ethical on the issue of causing suffering;
but it would be no less ethical than any other murder on the matter of killing.
Even though I have addressed your question and have hopefully convinced you; I
must add the rider that bringing such implausible and hypothetical situations
(inventing food grade chemicals that kill) to the current context in which this
discussion is framed, side-steps the real issue and dilutes the debate.

[ Think about those two scenarios…… food cycle on Earth) ]

The flaw here is the mistaking of consciousness for life and vice-versa. The
ethics of slaughter are first and primarily rooted in consciousness and animal
suffering. Animals and humans have nervous systems that are comparative both
anatomically and physiologically. A lot of our understanding of the human body
stems from animal experimentation. Consciousness derives from sensory input and
is demonstrated by pain, distress and avoidance action. All of which are
directly experienced personally by humans. All of which are equally observable
in animals, by humans. The recording of a pain reflex response is a critical
element of assessing consciousness in humans. To equate suffering emanating from
animal consciousness to plant ‘life’, that lacks a nervous system, is
preposterous.

[ Next paragraphs, ……..to see Madagascar some day 🙂 ]

I do hope you do.

[ Next you say ……. familiar habit and made to debate this! 😉 ]

I am sure my earlier point on consciousness puts paid to this incredible
argument.

[ Next paragraph ……… better scientific reasons (some of which I hope to touch
upon later, if this itself doesn’t get too long and bore my of myself). ]

There is a misreading of the essay. Let me clarify:

1. I clearly state that NEITHER a correlative NOR a causative inference can
be made between eating animals and violent behaviour. The philosophical point I
make is whether there is a correlative inference to a greater capacity with the
TOLERANCE OF VIOLENCE in people who are more exposed to the act of slaughtering
animals. It is perfectly reasonable to cogitate on a correlative connect with
tolerance or desensitisation. The latter by the way is a well documented
adaptive behavioural response.

It was Kant who first questioned whether a statement on human disposition was
possible by observing cruelty toward violence – is a man who treats an animal
cruelly capable of treating a human cruelly too? This has long been discarded as
implausible for lack of empirical evidence. People who work in slaughterhouses
are not more violent than those that don’t. They probably tolerate and accept
violence and gore with greater equanimity than those that don’t (‘those that
don’t’ includes herbivores *and* omnivores). Why are humans able to distinguish
between the suffering of animals from that in humans and why can’t we
extrapolate that; cruelty to animals implicitly means cruelty to humans? A
possible reason is our deep rooted Speciesism and unshakeable belief in human
exceptionalism.

The rest….

Everything I’ve said till now can easily address and answer these bits.

Let me address some of the issues with Omega-3 that came up on T (I really
did not read the whole chain and am simply referencing to things that I remember
reading):

I closed the segment on the philosophy of vegetarianism; clearly said that
its impact, if at all, on violence was probably related at most to a lower
capacity with TOLERANCE and had NOTHING to do with diet and EVERYTHING to do
with an ideology of non-violence. The nutritional segment had NOTHING to do with
the philosophical section. They were two separate sections and were addressed as
such. I never made an attempt to link them. In any case; I don’t see how they
can, in any logical sense, even if one wanted to. I addressed the issue of ghee
in the comments. Ghee was ONLY referenced as the natural substance with the
closest approximation of the ideal ratio. I said Omega-3 was needed by both
herbivores and omnivores and listed *currently* known sources for both groups.
Without discrimination. Or bias.

In closing, the essay at no point makes judgment on people, their faiths or
ideological belief. By referencing Madagascar; I stressed the importance of
moving from judgment to understanding, on all matters related to behaviour. I
also laced the essay with liberal self criticism; not as a technique in
persuasive style, but as a glimpse into the evolution of my thought. As I said
before; intellect is more important than the ego. It transcends ideology and
contains ample space for doubt.

Thank you once again for reading and for continuing the debate. It gave me a
chance to further elucidate my thoughts.

http://ketanpanchal.blogspot.com Ketan

First off, let me point out two instances in the article that brought the skeptic in me to fore:

1. “It is generally accepted knowledge that vegetarians are prone to non-violence and have a low capacity with and for active aggression” – that is weasel wording, and I would never approve of it as form of argumentation. Also, whether intended or not, the corollary of that is that “non-vegetarians are prone to violence and have a high(er than vegetarians) capacity for active aggression”. I would have preferred this corollary as the primary statement (it is a different matter it would sound politically more incorrect, but then honest discussions should not have political correctness as an important consideration, if it was being one).

2. That fish is a rich source of omega 3 fatty acids should’ve been included in the pertinent paragraph, and not as a foot note.

Now addressing (mainly) Stupidosaur,

From both the debate over twitter and your published comment above I have inferred the following to be your salient counter-points or points of contention. I’ll try to put them as simply as possible so that it would be easy for you to add to them or to modify them to reflect your position more accurately accurately.

1. There is an equivalence between lives of animals and plants (because both are living organisms and both respond to external stimuli). As an extension of this equivalence, you state that destructive intent towards both is equally violent, and that sanitization involved in bringing plants and animals to our plates has much the same effect in detaching the eater from violence committed against them. Further you state that in fact killing plants is worse because: (a) they cannot even protest, and (b) in terms of ‘life’ potential we end up killing lot many potentially viable independent organisms in the process. As part of drawing this equivalence, you had dismissed animals possessing brain as having any bearing on the entire debate.

2. Irrespective of whether you agree that certain communities could be more or less prone to violence, one cannot conclude with certainty if it is the food habits that are the cause for that.

3. You see non-involvement of people eating meat in the process of killing as an inconsistency in what you infer to be the author’s fundamental premise that ‘*eating* non-veg food leads to violent tendencies’.

4. You point out that the magnitude of wave of turning vegetarian and its causes are undetermined.

5. You assert with regard to revealing to kids how their food was prepared, there should be equivalence between process for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food.

6. Milking animals is unethical because of the harm to the calf (and perhaps you allude to the discomfort caused to the milch animal as well by ‘eve teasing’).

7. You cite certain famous personalities as ‘exceptions’ to the hypothesis in question.

8. You had asked (over twitter) if soldiers returning from war would be more prone to violence? [I hope I’d gathered your question correctly].

9. If it would come to be accepted that those associated with meat industry are indeed more prone to violence against humans than those in other industries, then they would be discriminated against.

—–

Now responding to your contentions. 😀

First and foremost, violence as a phenomenon is extremely complex. Meaning, right from an impulse arising in the mind to hurt someone, to absolutely acting on it, there are almost innumerable modifying factors – including the person’s state of mind at a point in time. Medicine, and more so psychology, is certainly not like ‘classical’ physics that cause-and-effect relationships would be cut and dry. So, for anyone to assert that ‘so and so thing *causes* violence’ would be naive. Now, a consequence of violence as a manifestation of multiple modifiable and non-modifiable factors, is that to test individual hypotheses would be extremely difficult. It’s much worse than trying to study obesity or carcinogenesis. So, the insistence that an opinion piece such as this be backed by ‘facts’ is not reasonable. What kind of statistic will you buy as fact? One of the foremost tests of soundness of a hypothesis is its falsifiability. If the null hypothesis is that there is no correlation between eating meat and violent behavior, what kind of study design would you like to be able to conclude that the null hypothesis is false? One could always point out that there could be this confounding factor or that confounding factor, and it is for this reason I’d brought up the topic of cigarette smoking and lung cancer. There are people who smoke quite avidly and never acquire lung cancer, and there also are people who don’t smoke and yet get the same histological type of cancer that smokers are said to be predisposed to. What does this tell as about cigarette smoking as a risk factor for developing lung caner? Hence, in the medical field there is almost no such thing as ’cause’. Even if we say that Mycobacterium tuberculosis ’causes’ tuberculosis, almost 40% of population harbors the bacillus in their lungs without developing overt tuberculosis. So, in medical statistics we have concepts like ‘odds ratio’ and ‘attributable risks’. So, to be most fair may be would require to surveys of the kind I’d alluded [survey the eating habits of criminals convicted for violence and compare that with the prevalence of vegetarianism v/s non-vegetarianism in the same community]. Of course, such surveys would not be free from confounding factors, but that is the only kind of ‘facts’ that we could come up with. Second, we could have some ‘experimental psychology’. E.g., make certain people answer a questionnaire which would try to gauge how violently they are likely to respond to humans in given situations. Then, make them kill animals and plants for a few days. Then, give them the same/similar questionnaire again. Then, gauge if and how their propensity to violence would have altered in the two groups. One more experiment could be tried: people’s revulsion to visuals showing violent treatment to humans could be gauged through some kind of polygraphy in three groups before and after the ‘intervention’: (1) those made to kill animals violently over days to weeks, (2) those made to kill plants violently over days to weeks and (3) control group (not made to do anything). Of course, I’m not saying these kind of experiments would necessarily be permitted by respective ethics committees. Then, there can be studies on attitudes towards violence towards humans of those who would recently join abattoirs.

The point is: unless and until above kind of experiments are conducted and results would be out (it’s possible some such studies might’ve actually been conducted; it’s just that I’ve not searched for them as yet), there is no margin to present ‘facts’ on such a topic, and so it is wrong to demand them.

Now addressing the points I had inferred from your arguments:

1. It is true both plants and animals are ‘alive’, but the issue is of inflicting pain upon them. It is possible that plants also might be actually feeling ‘pain’ (though I don’t believe they do), does the one killing a plant **know** that the said plant is suffering from pain? That is the most important question (for me). Even as a child when I realized plants had lives, for a few years I used to imagine them to have a consciousness, and I used to avoid plucking flowers or leaves. But even in those days, if I were to actually pluck a leaf and eat it, I would not feel much remorse. I would not have felt I did something ‘wrong’ to the plant. But it would have never occurred to me that I pluck a pinna of a dog or a cat and just eat it (not because I would not see the pinna as edible, but because the amount of pain I would be inflicting upon the said animals is something I would be unacceptable to me). To this end I remember sometimes I used to throw stones at dogs as I used to be afraid of them, and then someone had asked me (rhetorically) as to how I would feel if I were hit with a stone, and that had made me realize that dogs also whine/cry when a stone would hit them, and I had stopped doing that out of guilt [before that question was asked, I was more consumed by my need to keep dogs away and hatred towards them cuz of their fear]. In fact, even if I would not have learned all that biology, it would have been easy for me to understand that animals are alive and to be able to *relate to* what kind of pain they feel when physically traumatized. I would have never felt the same way about plants. I would not be able to *relate to* the ‘feelings’ of plants when they are uprooted or cut by knives or cooked on stove. You might accuse me of being insensitive towards plants, and you would be right! Because for me, the debate was never about sensitivity towards plants and/or animals, but about doing something repeatedly that rather desensitizes us towards suffering (we would have acknowledged) of an entity towards whose suffering we would have been sensitive to begin with. It is for certain reason that stuffed toys have limbs and eyes and mouth, and because of which small kids feel a sense of attachment. Few kids feel the same kind of emotional connect towards ‘Lego’ building blocks or guns. So, as a thought experiment do you feel kids would be able to feel an emotional connect towards stuffed ‘toy plants’? I *intuitively* feel, NO! Why I’m stressing so much these aspects is because issue is not whether ‘scientifically speaking’ plants have life and/or ‘consciousness’ or not, but whether do we see human-like attributes in animals or not to begin with? Of course, what I state here are my subjective feelings and am again stressing that my beliefs and premises are subjective. You may buy them only if you can relate to them, otherwise obviously you ought to discard them. So, if subjectively I don’t see equivalence between mechanical damage to a plant v/s to an animal, I am not convinced by your extended points.

2. I agree, but that does not mean one must never speculate about what could predispose people to violence. Because then the same kind of confounding factors are encountered in medical research! Yet, we more or less rely upon those results and use that knowledge with certain degree of confidence.

3. The author has never asserted that it is *eating* non-veg food that could make violence seem acceptable. In fact, that is the reason the entire point of sanitization has been brought up. So, in effect you we re countering a straw man argument.

4. I agree. In my understanding, the author was only trying to point out that when people become aware of treatment to animals that become their food, at least certain fraction of them are not able to stomach the violence that meat eating entails, and hence give up.

5. I would agree with you. But yes, I’d even here feel a bit of ethical dilemma just like what to tell my kids about my beliefs in existence of God cuz what I would tell them would have great influence on their subsequent beliefs (perhaps, in agreement in childhood, and disagreement in adolescence out of rebellious streak). Because kids don’t easily understand the difference between ‘facts’ and ‘opinions’.

6. Yes, I more or less agree. At best the only ‘defense’ I could offer is that if one were to stick to a diet only involving killing of animals, then dairy products turn out to be the only food source to compensate for that. Also again, the point of degree of involvement with process of milking is pertinent. Hence, there are people who give up on all animal products, including dairy, honey, eggs, leather, fur, etc, once they know of the ill-treatment/violence against animals involved in their manufacture.

7. I see these exceptions as irrelevant. In fact, to even bring them up means you’re misunderstanding the author’s hypothesis as one about causation as against about predisposition.

8. Yes, I believe soldiers returning from wars indeed would feel much lesser remorse on killing a civilian. As I said, manifestation of violence is a complex phenomenon. The reason soldiers do not indulge in rampant violence is because they are actively trained to curtail their instincts. E.g., I’d joined ‘karate classes’ for a year, and one of the foremost things our coach used to drill into our minds was that these techniques were to be used for self-defense purpose only, and not for fun or to harm others. But more to the point, I could see that during sparring, the opponents would get hurt very often, and I ‘subjectively’ felt that more and more the students would spar, the lesser remorse or guilt they used to feel to hurt their opponent (it had become ‘just a fight’, making students oblivious to the fact that the pain felt by the opponent was real). So, it is this kind of progressive desensitization that I’m alluding to that results from persistently indulging in acts that involve deliberate infliction of pain. How sharp is the ‘compartmentalization’ in our mind that “this blood and shriek are of a lamb” and “this blood and shriek are of a human” is a matter of separate debate. Perhaps, a debate would not even be able to settle it cuz our understanding is subjective and intuitive, and furthermore humans are heterogeneous – not necessarily all would respond in same fashion. I’ve heard some people say that retired soldiers if wronged (by civillians), would settle the scores themselves without taking a legal recourse. I do not know if this is indeed true, but felt it is pertinent in our discussion of capacity for violence by soldiers.

9. I don’t think if such a discrimination, if it were to arise, should be the reason such a hypothesis should not be considered as plausible.

I know my comment is embarrassingly long. I was thinking if I should post it as a separate blog post, but then I thought it more ‘honest’ to put my comment here as it was the author’s and your thoughts that had evoked this response.

Thanks for a patient reading, to all those who manage to finish reading! 😀

http://ketanpanchal.blogspot.com Ketan

That was a very well articulated response without resorting to any kind of rhetoric. I guess you and I have more or less made the same points (with your doing so more concisely. 😀 ).

http://twitter.com/menkris Meena N Swamy

Apologies for acknowledging this so late/ I didn’t know how to edit. Indeed! It was Marty who wanted to see Africa and Alex grudgingly followed his best friend. 😀 Thank you for the correction.

http://twitter.com/ganpat73 munusamy ganapathy

we kill billions of creatures for our cell phone towers,transport,buildings,power plants,ammunitions,research and have no problems with that and cannot even think of preventing this slaughter but want to make the world convert to the diet practises of certain castes who thought that they are superior by avoiding certain types of food

Is it ok if people eat dead animals as they are not killing the animal and the act is beneficial to environment

Indeed 🙂 That is why I don’t buy the morality argument. Now if there is any conclusive health issue – and remember, not straw man arguments of excessive consumption, etc – I am willing to consider it. Given the fish heavy diets of the Japanese, the meat-heavy diets of the large parts of the world, and vegetarian preferences in India, I am not sure that diet alone can explain health deficiencies.